FSB is ready to enter the US market after securing significant working capital from Toronto-based private equity firm Clairvest this summer.
Speaking at last month’s Betting on Sports conference, FSB CEO Dave McDowell admitted that he was careful not to overpromise and underdeliver when the US market initially opened last year.
However, with the support of Clairvest, he thinks that his company has put in place “the right architecture” which allows it to “deploy different enterprise solutions across multiple states and aggregate the data into a common central risk management team.”
He also suggested that there is plenty of “buyer’s remorse” amongst those operators who made knee-jerk supplier choices around what was available in order to go live quickly.
“It’s blatantly obvious that the US is going to be one of the largest regulated sports betting markets in the next five years,” added McDowell. “We need to be there, but what we’re trying to do is leverage our contacts and relationships through Clairvest to talk to individual casinos that don’t want a ‘me too’ solution.
“The investment from Clairvest is a fantastic endorsement of FSB, the company and the technology we’ve put in place. What really attracted me to them was, as a private equity company, they’ve got a lot of experience investing into bricks-and-mortar casino, so they bring a fantastic Rolodex of contacts for us.
“They wanted to back our vision. They were actively looking for sports betting suppliers to invest in and expose their portfolio to because they could see the rapid growth in sports betting across the globe. So, we’ve got a very exciting investment partner that allows us to make the transition from a white label operator to an enterprise solution supplier.”
Despite this transition, FSB told SBC News that it won’t be leaving the UK white label market, instead choosing to implement ‘state-of-the-art systems’ for customer protection to prevent future issues for its white label platform.
This came in response to the UKGC review of FSB, and the termination of its relationship with 1xBet and temporary suspension of a second site, which McDowell admitted had somewhat soured a period of fantastic growth for a company that takes such pride in “compliance, integrity and a commitment to regulated markets”.
